Great max rendering

DON'T RENDER MOVIES—RENDER FRAMES!

Unless you're rendering a small-format, quick-and-dirty test animation, get into the habit of always rendering image sequences (.TGA, .TIF, .PNG image formats; avoid using .JPG unless you simply don't have the hard drive space) rather than movie files (.AVI, .MOV, and so on). Image sequences have many advantages over straight movie formats.


First, unless you originally used a lossless codec for your sequence, you'll experience an ugly drop in image quality when playing back your animation. Second, if you render an enormous (that is, memory-hogging) animation, you have to load that entire file into RAM to play it, and if you have a slow graphics card, it will run like a turtle dipped in caramel. Third, it's tougher to do any kind of post-production manipulation, such as compositing, on a movie file—especially an .AVI that uses a lossy codec—than an image sequence. (You can't save an alpha channel for compositing in an .AVI file.) Fourth, if you encounter an error during the rendering, or 3ds max or your computer crashes, you'll lose only the unrendered frames, rather than your entire animation (which might get corrupted during the crash). Fifth, your mom said no, and she doesn't want to have to tell you again!
The bottom line is, don't render movies; render image sequences, and load them (or resize them as necessary, upon loading) into the RAM Player. (Choose Rendering > RAM Player from the main 3ds max toolbar.)